1. Sort Your Keywords
We often get asked how to sort and prioritize keywords by many marketers and business owners who choose to go with #inbound. Sorting and prioritizing is very straightforward if you know the 4 basic principles of sorting keywords:
A. Keywords a.k.a search intentions
B. Volume
C. Competition
D. Number of indexed pages
A. Search intentions refer to information that users are looking for. When a user is searching for “gantt chart’’, he or she might be looking for information about what gantt chart is, how to use it, download some samples or start exploring the history and best practises of gantt charts. Gantt charts are bar charts mainly used for project management purposes in case you are wondering.
Generally, a user refers to Google with the intention to:
1. Learn something
2. Do something
3. Go somewhere
This means when you are sorting your keywords for your #inbound marketing campaign, you want to make sure you ask yourself the following questions:
- What content would best address my buyer personas’ search intention?
- What content will my buyer personas find super informative / interesting / shareable so they can share and bookmark it in their browser?
B. Keyword volumes refer to the monthly search estimates on Google globally or from particular locations. When you are sorting your keywords by search volumes, you should view data for only one location, not all locations. This is because it’s highly probable that your site will only rank highly in one version of Google (i.e. … com.au). How many searches a keyword gets globally is irrelevant as to get that level of traffic you would need to rank highly in every version of Google. It’s only how many searches a keyword gets, for example, in Australia that matters to you.
Sorting keywords by volumes gives you strategic data on how to prioritize your content strategy, however you should note that search volume figures aren’t 100% accurate. Therefore, you should only use them as a guide and primarily compare keywords with each other (e.g. “gantt chart’’ gets searched 3 times more than “old school project management system’’ gets searched for) rather than as an exact prediction of how much traffic your website will receive from a search engine if it ranks highly for a particular keyword.
C. Sorting your keywords based on competition. Before explaining how to sort your keywords based on Google Adwords competition rank (low, medium high), first it’s necessary to highlight a few aspects of it that can be misleading and can result in mistakes being made.
Warning: the competition figure returned by AdWords is the competition between advertisers, not competition between content providers (which is super hard to find anywhere available on the internet).
However, many marketers use the sorting principles of paid rankings to prioritize their content marketing strategy based on how advertisers compete. Again, just like with sorting principle of keyword volumes, you should use the sorting to compare keywords with each other and make your decisions based on your comparisons.
D. Sorting keywords based on indexed pages is one of the misutilized parameters when you apply a strategy to your keyword research. Indexed pages are the number of pages that have been indexed by Google that contain a particular keyword.
With gantt chart there 802.000 indexed pages in Google US. In Australia there are 865.000 indexed pages with the following keyword. Just as we discussed in point 1.B., analysing the indexed pages globally is irrelevant, if you want to target your content strategy for the Australian market.
As the engines crawl and index the content of pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in keyword-based indexes rather than storing 25 billion web pages all in one database. So when sorting your keywords based on the number of indexed pages, make sure to compare keywords based on indexed pages by location as well.
2. Optimize Website Content
Long-tail keywords are those keywords that are greatly used in website content. Try to understand which keywords are associated with your company’s website and use them in different pages, to make it more visible in search engines.
3. Create a Content Calendar
Short-term keywords are usually used for some engaging content, for example, blog posts. Try to create a content calendar with these keywords, so your content writers know which keywords they should concentrate on. It is important to add a few effective keywords for each blog post. In order to use the right keywords, try to understand which topics will interest your readers, and try to provide such information.
4. Create Landing Pages
Long-tail keywords are also used in creating landing pages. For example, you can create a landing page about an event, offer or a campaign and used a related keyword. Landing pages are those places that users fall after clicking on links in email, but they can also be used in order to optimize for SEO using some relevant keywords.
The more landing pages and offers based on long-tail keywords you have, the higher the ROI will be out of all your content marketing efforts. According to international content marketing benchmarks, companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7x more leads than those with fewer than 10 and 48% of marketers build a new landing page for each marketing campaign.
5. Pay Attention to Your Website’s Meta Data
If you want your website to be fully optimized, then you should go through it once more and pay attention to meta data. You need to make sure that keywords of each page are also included in meta description, alt tags of the pictures and in texts of h2 tags. This will optimize keywords and will improve SEO.
6. Don’t Do Harm
As you already know how you can use keywords in your website, make sure you do not cause harm with these keywords. By using the wrong keywords you will end up causing more harm than good. In order to do everything right, just remember to focus on one or two keywords in a page. There is no need to confuse your users. Try to make it clear what that page is about and why these keywords are used there.
Now, you know which are the 6 actionable steps that will help you apply your keyword research. Do you think there are other steps? Please share them with us in the comments below.
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